Structure at Owl Creek Bridge
Day 80 of Writing
The short film based on Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge got me thinking about narrative structure. A few days ago (or weeks, who can keep track?), Belle mentioned she had never seen Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. A couple of days later I was flipping channels and there it was as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, so we watched it together. The original 1890 short story is the most anthologized story in American literature.
A French made version was also repurposed as a season 5 Twilight Zone episode with voice over narration. While it was not syndicated, it is available for streaming now on Netflix. By the way, we just watched the first season of Jordan Peele’s take on the Twilight Zone and he totally gets the spirit of the original. It was very satisfying and we are looking forward to season 2 which will be on CBS All Access in June. The two earlier revivals (1985 and 2002) just did not fully get it. I did have the opportunity to work on set for a Twilight Zone episode of the first revival, the one that starred Danny Kaye. For a science fiction nerd like me, that was quite a thrill.
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge starts out with something dramatic, the hanging, then tells the main body of the story, and then throws in a surprise ending that brings it all back to the beginning. I realized that my novel has a similar structure. With the exception of the beginning and end of my story, what you think is going on is not at all what is really going on.
It does not hang on a gimmick like having it all be imaginary or be a dream, though. That has been done many times since Bierce, perhaps least successfully with the television series Dallas. Unless, of course, my remembering an entire season of Dallas turning out to be a dream was just a dream.
Bierce’s structure allows him to get something dramatic going right away. Mine does as well. I have five major characters, and several important minor characters. They all have to be introduced, and that is not typically all that dramatic a way to start the story. That is why I chose to start at near the end of the story, then flash back to what happened to get us there, and then return to the same time as the beginning of the story to give the final surprise reveal. This lets me have a dramatic scene right at the beginning before the reader really knows what is going on.
Besides the surprise twist at the end, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is considered the classic early example of non-linear storytelling. Pulp Fiction took the concept of non-linear story telling even further, and so did Lost with its many flashbacks and flash sideways. It is a fun way to tell a story, and while Bierce was not the very first, he did popularize the concept.
Bierce does some interesting foreshadowing in the original short story, and it made me think about the importance of foreshadowing. I wanted to do some foreshadowing that things are not what they seem, but I didn’t want to do so much that I gave it away. This is always a tricky balance, one that Bierce did an amazing job with.
I also realized that I needed to foreshadow more than just plot points. I have a pivotal scene where two of my characters banter in a specific humorous way. To make that make sense, I really need to go back earlier in the story and establish that they do this kind of banter together. Otherwise, it comes out of left field and does not feel organic. It becomes just a jokey moment rather than something that naturally flows in the story.
I will now think harder about how future character interactions and relationships can be better established earlier in the book. This is a continuing learning process for me.
Ambrose Bierce was best known in his time as a journalist, perhaps the best known in the country. It is his fiction that we remember today, though. He is considered one of the great American writers of fiction, and he is credited as one of the earliest writers of the psychological horror story.
I wrote about artificial intelligence in my previous blog entry, I Am AI, Fear Me! While the term AI would not come into use until it was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, Bierce wrote one of the earliest stories about thinking machines.
In his 1899 Moxom’s Master, it opens with the narrator asking “Are you serious? — do you really believe that a machine thinks?” This was followed a philosophical discussion of whether machines could actually think.
The machine in the story was a chess playing mechanical man, an automaton- the mechanical precursor to animatronics. Amazing things could be done essentially using clever mechanisms with gears and springs.
I got to work for a couple of weeks on a show with Alain Cabooter and his amazing IONI. It was a doll a little over 3 feet tall. He set it on a swinging trapeze, and it did a life-like performance with spins and head stands. At times it appears as if his muscles are straining. Alain and IONI toured with magician Doug Henning and appeared for a long run at Caeser’s Palace. It was amazing. Check out the YouTube Video.
IONI is similar to the magician Robert-Houdin”s Trapeze performing automaton Antonio Diavolo. He began showing it in 1849. The original is owned and was restored by illusion builder John Gaughan, and the workings are quite ingenius.
As with so many of Bierce’s horror stories, things did not turn out well. It seems that the chess playing robot was a very, very sore loser. This may be the earliest story about an AI turning against its creator.
The concept of a chess playing robot was not actually something new. In 1770, a chess playing automaton named The Turk began touring the world and almost always won. It was mechanical, but it was not a thinking machine. It had a person cleverly concealed inside.
When Bierce wrote his story in 1899, chess playing machines without human assistance were still fiction. Just 13 years later, an actual chess playing robot began to be exhibited. Called El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player), it played an endgame with just three chess pieces. It moved a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent. It used mechanisms that worked using a simple algorithm to ensure that it won every time.
While Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was used as a Twilight Zone episode, the end of Bierce’s life could have been a Twilight Zone episode. In October of 1913, the 71 year old Bierce set out from Washington D.C. to revisit some of the old Civil War sites he covered as a journalist. It has long been believed that he went to Mexico to cover the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa. He was never heard from again. Recent scholarship has failed to turn up any evidence that he actually made it to Mexico. Ambrose Bierce, one of America’s greatest writers, simply vanished.
What’s Up with Us
I found something that made me feel better. We went to a nursery. We love going to botanical gardens and this is as close as we can get now. I had a large raised bed vegetable garden at our previous house. It had three yards, we had two hot tubs (one just outside the bedroom door and one at the back of the yard). It was great for entertaining, but when the drought hit, we knew we’d need a place that used a lot less water. Here it is all hardscape. There are planters, but the soil is hard as a rock, so all our plants are in pots.
There is so much shade that we never planted tomatoes as we have done every year before we moved here. This year we are trying them in pots, but even raised up into the air in the sunniest spot, it still does not get eight hours of direct sun. Never one to give up, we are awaiting a grow light which will be used to supplement. It will be an interesting experiment.
We had a little used large garden wagon, so we drug it out of the garage and into the back and filled it with terra cotta pots in which we planted a bunch of herbs. I have always had fresh herbs until we moved here, and I really missed them. We’ll see how that experiment goes as well. For now they look beautiful and I love sitting out there and smelling their fragrance. It gives me a little peace.
We do have to be careful going outside. Last year, a brand new mosquito appeared. These Asian black beasties are tiny but vicious. Apparently they arrived here by cargo container. They bite multiple times, the bites are very painful, and they leave welts and divots in your leg. We use the citronella (which masks their ability to smell and locate people), but we need to find a way to eradicate them.
Today in L.A. begins a soft opening that seems reasonable, taking it slow, monitoring how it is going, and trying to figure out the best practices for the future. Other states are swinging open the doors and telling people to just go forth with little guidance. I worry things will not go well for them.